THE LINGUISTICS, NEUROLOGY, AND POLITICS OF PHONICS - PART 8 pdf

Chapter

12

The Naturalness of Exceptions
to Phonics Rules

The complexity of the phonics rules proposed previously may seem some­
what strange. What does it mean to say that one phonics rule assigns an ex­
ceptional status to a string or word with respect to another phonics rule?
Why should phonics rules behave according to a Principle for Competing
Phonics Rules (PCPR)?
But reflecting on the panoply of phonics rules, and on the global princi­
ples governing their interaction, makes it clear that there is a fundamental
naturalness to their formulation. Consider the simple rules for digraphs,
such as "ph is pronounced [f]" or "ch is pronounced [c]." To say, for exam­
ple, that "ph is pronounced [f]" applies to an input string like Phil, and that
"p is pronounced [p]" and "h is pronounced [h]" do not, is simply another
way of saying that Phil is an exception to the latter rules.
Thus, the PCPR simply describes the conditions under which an input
string is an exception to a rule, and undergoes another rule instead. From
this perspective, it is entirely natural to expect the phonics system to also in­
clude rules that simply assign exception status to certain strings. In this
manner, the system allows words that are exceptions to the exceptions.
Thus, pint is an exception to the short-vowel rule, which itself is an excep­
tion to the default rule "i is pronounced [ay]."
The existence of exceptions to exceptions can be seen whenever there
are three groups of words with respect to a rule: (a) pi and hi undergo only
default rules, yielding [pay] and [hay]; (b) pin, sin, hint undergo the "z is
pronounced [I]" rule, which is an exception to the default rule "i is pro­
nounced [ay]," and because no other nondefault rules apply to these

words, they can be called first-order exceptions; (c) bind, find, and grind are sec­
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ond-order exceptions, with pronunciations determined by the rule "ind is an
exception to the short-vowel rule for letter i" which itself is an exception to
the default rule for vowel letter i; (d) wind (a stormy wind) is a third-order ex­
ception, because it is an exception to the ind rule, which itself is an exception
to the short-vowel rule, which itself is an exception to the default rule for
the vowel letter i.
The full phonics system is replete with these layered exceptions. Thus,
ma and pa are first-order exceptions to the default rule for the letter a.
Words ending in ild and old, such as child, mild, wild, cold, gold, hold, mold,
sold, and told, are first-order exceptions to the short rule for vowel letters i
and o. The word have is an exception to the default rule for the vowel letters
a and e, thus making it a double first-order exception. Clearly, the status of a
form as a first or higher order exception does not mean that its pronuncia­
tion pattern is unusual, nor that its spelling pattern is all that strange. The
theoretical significance of the order of an exception is still unstudied, but
an interesting empirical question is whether these exception parameters
play a role in some aspect of literacy development, such as invented spell­
ings, the pronunciation of unfamiliar words, and so on.
The reasons for the existence of layered exceptions are several. First, we
can immediately observe that there is a mismatch between the number of
alphabetic letters in the system (26) and the number of phonemes in the
spoken language (about 45). There can only be 26 default rules. Some

sounds of the language therefore do not have their own, private letters. Of
necessity, therefore, some letters will be used to represent more than one
sound, creating conditions for both default and nondefault rules.
First and higher order exceptions can also arise from the existence of
quite natural phonemic alternations in the spoken language. Because in­
flectional suffixes spelled with the letter s are pronounced with a voiceless
[s] sound when immediately following a voiceless consonant sound, as in
tops, pots, and pocks, but with a [z] sound otherwise, then an invariant spell­
ing of the suffix must undergo nondefault rules to produce its range of pro­
nunciations. As previously noted, the invariant spelling of a morpheme that
has variant pronunciations serves the useful purpose of conveying the iden­
tity of the suffix. Therefore, the exception rules of phonics follow necessar­
ily from this advantageous function.
First and higher order exceptions will make their appearance when
phonics patterns come face to face with other requirements of the system.
Some of the most unforgiving requirements come from the spelling rules.
For example, there are only rare exceptions to the prohibition against final
v and u, such as colloquial gov, nickname Bev, or loanword gnu. The written
language needs one or more mechanisms to render words legal with re­
spect to the spelling rules. In English, this often takes the form of a place­
holder silent e. But then the spellings thus created to satisfy the spelling re­


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quirements, such as have and give, will of necessity complicate the phonics
patterns.
Historically, many spelling patterns have absolutely nothing to do with

pronunciation. In his wonderful Encyclopedia of the English Language, Crystal
(1995) pointed out a number of these. Early printers, for example, would
simply add letters to a word in order to make a sequence of words fit neatly
into a line, so that "line justification was often achieved by shortening or
lengthening words rather than by varying the word spaces. Variarion in the
final e of a word was a common result" (p. 274). In this way, some words ac­
tually acquired several spellings, such as dog,dogg, dogge.
Crystal (1995) also noted that "16th-century scholars tried to indicate
something of the history of a word in its spelling. The b in debt, for example,
was added by people who felt it was important for everyone to know that the
word comes from debitum in Latin" (p. 275). Other words that changed
their spellings accordingly are doubt, reign, and island. The practice, accord­
ing to Crystal (p. 275), overextended to words such as delight and tight.
Crystal (p. 67) discussed the well-known example of 16th century school­
master Richard Mulcaster, who was influential in achieving some regular­
ization of English spelling, but who did not equate regularization with
phoneticization. Mulcaster advocated "increased use of a ... silent e" to
mark a preceding long vowel (p. 67). As with words with silent gh, however,
it is generally felt that Mulcaster's idea was applied a little too liberally, so
that short vowels and silent e now cooccur in some, gone, done, give, love, and
have.
In the end, English spelling "is an amalgam of several traditions" (Crys­
tal, p. 275). But the traditions themselves are hardly potent enough to pre­
vent the natural history of language from producing mismatches between
spellings and pronunciations. Over time, an unavoidable discrepancy be­
tween spellings and pronunciations results simply from the physical differ­
ence between visual matter and auditory matter. Oral language is quick to
produce, and dissipates almost immediately once uttered. Visual language
is slower to produce, but persists. It is in virtue of this difference that spo­
ken language works best in immediate space and time, whereas visual lan­

guage works best over prolonged space and time.
The flip side of this, of course, is that the pace of oral language change is
significantly different from that of visual language. It is the material charac­
ter of oral language that frees it up to undergo change at a much more
rapid pace than that of visual language. So, an earlier version of a spoken
language will, after a period of decades or centuries, turn into a variety of
distinct languages and dialects. But the visual representation of that lan­
guage remains relatively fixed and stable.
It is this differential rate of change, ultimately due to the different prop­
erties of the physical media, that leads to a separation over time between


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spellings and their pronunciations. Even if they start out perfectly transpar­
ent, with each letter of a word's spelling corresponding unambiguously to a
phoneme of the spoken language, there will be a historical divergence, with
spellings more transparently representing older pronunciations of the
word. Conversely, such spellings less transparently represent contemporary
pronunciations.
This is indeed borne out by countless examples. Consider the l that ap­
pears in the spelling of words such as would and should. This l is silent in
modern English pronunciations. So why is it part of the spelling of these
words? Clearly, it is because the spelling represents an earlier stage of the
word, corresponding to an oral language in which it was pronounced. In­
deed, Old English spellings reflected the contemporary pronunciations of
wolde and scyld, which included the sound [1].
This diametrical opposition between the physics of a visual medium and

the physics of an auditory medium takes form in the phonics system, where
spellings and pronunciations stand in relation to one another. Though we
can rationally unravel the uneven oral and visual changes over time, and
understand why a particular spelling is opaque with respect to its pronunci­
ation, the formal phonics system has no privileged access to its own history.
Thus, changes that may have taken centuries to materialize are forced to
confront each other in the moment. This confrontation must lead to a dis­
turbance in the system, because simple, general, default rules are no longer
capable of expressing all the spelling-sound relationships.
Clearly, a rule does not have to be specifically characterized as an excep­
tion rule for it to function as such. Even a rule like "ph is pronounced [f ],"
which looks rather benign, and applies virtually across the board, expresses
the exceptional status of ph words with respect to the rules "pis pronounced
[p]" and "h is pronounced [h]." Exceptional patterns may still be quite reg­
ular.
In an important sense, therefore, any phonic pattern governed by a rule
other than a default rule is an exception pattern, but it is really only for ex­
pository purposes that the term exception rule has been used in the more lim­
ited sense of referring to rules that actually assign an exception status,
marked with an asterisk, to a string. And, strings can acquire or develop
multiple exception patterns. The embedding of exceptions occurs on input
strings of ever-increasing size. The limiting string in such a sequence is a
particular, individual word
Thus, "mis pronounced [iy]," as in beak, beat, feat, freak, heat, leak, neat,
peak, peat, seat, and wheat, expresses the observation that words with ea are
exceptions to "« is pronounced [ey]." Nothing more than ea needs to be
specified in the rule's input. In particular, we do not need to encode in the
rule the specific words that undergo it. These will be found simply by a scan­
ning of the input string for the substring ea.

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But steak, idiosyncratically pronounced [steyk], and not the expected
[stiyk], needs its own rule: "steak is pronounced st[ey]k." A similar idiosyn­
cratic rule applies to great. Such rules have an entire word as input, express­
ing the observation that it is the word itself that is the exception, not simply
the string of letters that constitutes the word's spelling. They are wholeword exceptions, and undergo whole-word phonics rules, which is the theo­
retical significance of the phenomenon of sight words.
Similiarly, we can say that "said is pronounced s[E] d" expresses the ob­
servation that the word said is an exception to "ai is pronounced [ey],"
"plaid is pronounced pl[ze]d" expresses a similar observation; "one is pro­
nounced [WA] n" expresses the observation that the word one is idiosyncrati­
cally pronounced with an initial [w] and an unexpected vowel; "gone is pro­
nounced g[a]n' expresses the observation that the word gone is an
exception to the default rule for vowel letter o; and "son is pronounced
S[A] n" expresses the observation that the word son is an exception to "o is
pronounced [a]."
Yet how can we be certain that it is not the letter strings said, plaid, one,
gone, and son that are exceptions, rather than the words themselves? The an­
swer, as always in a scientific investigation, depends on what is revealed by
an examination of the empirical evidence.
Consider simple examples like tone and lone. These undergo the usual
rules that convert them to [town] and [lown]. In fact, these rules are phoni­
cally general, applying to most input strings with an initial consonant and
stem vowel o in the setting of a silent e.
Now consider the pronunciation of the word one. If the rule that con­
verted one into a phonemic string with an initial [w] applied to the letter

string one, and not to the word one, then it should also apply to tone and lone,
indeed, to any string containing the letter string one. But this is clearly not
the case. Words with a consonant letter before one, that is, Cone, are not pro­
nounced [CwAn].
Therefore, to maintain the hypothesis that "or^is pronounced [wA]n"
applies to the letter string one, and not to the word one, we would have to
say that tone and lone, in fact, all words spelled with a consonant letter fol­
lowed by one, are exceptions to the rule for one. This rule would be "Cone is
an exception to the rule 'ow^is pronounced [ W A ] . ' " But this is an entirely
ad hoc solution, forced on us solely by the assumption that "one is pro­
nounced [WA] n" applies to the letter string one, not the word one. It turns a
whole class of regularly behaving words into an otherwise unnecessary ex­
ception class, because this exception status is entirely avoidable with the
more natural assumption that "one is pronounced [WA]W" applies to the
word one. As such, tone and lone are not pronounced with a [w] sound for
the very simple reason that they do not contain the word one, but only the
letter string one.


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Phonics rules can apply to successively larger domains, approaching the
level of the word. Thus, what I have called a default rule applies to a single
letter, without regard for neighboring letters. Some rules apply to a small
string of letters, such as ph or sh. Others apply to a single letter, but only in
the setting of certain other letters, such as letter i becoming long [ay] when
followed by word-final nd. And still others apply to single or multiple letters,
but only when they occur in specific words, such as ai becoming [E] in said,

ea becoming [ey] in break, great, and steak (but not in bread, grease, and
stealth).
Not all words can, even in principle, undergo word-level phonics rules.
Such rules can apply only to an already existing word. They cannot apply to
possible but nonexistent words, such as those used in experimental studies
of decoding. It makes no sense to say that a phonics rule exists that applies
to the possible though nonexistent word glig. What peculiarity of English
could possibly prompt such a rule? On what basis would someone even
know that it existed, having no prior experience with glig?
Word-based phonics rules do not arise in a vacuum. There can be no
such rule that applies to the nonexistent glig in anticipation of its coinage
some time in the future. Instead, word-based phonics rules arise in the
course of the actual history of the language, which affects written and oral
forms differently, engendering a divergence of path for the two, and lead­
ing, in some cases, to letter-sound relationships that are so opaque as to ap­
ply only to one particular word.
When experimental scientists use possible but nonexistent words as a
way to test phonological processing and knowledge of phonics, they are
only getting at a portion of the rules that actually exist, and certainly not the
ones that reflect the real-life linguistic and nonlinguistic forces that operate
on the lexicon, and that push individual words to their own, unique phonic
identities. Possible but nonexistent words have no history, so their phonic
structure will be ahistorical and pure. This is a position hardly distinguish­
able from that of the spelling reformers, and reflects a misguided notion of
how human language is supposed to work. It is a view that sets up an unat­
tainable and sanitized version of language that is supposed to provide sim­
ple minds with the key to learning.
The fundamental difference, therefore, between possible written words
and actual written words is that only actual words tolerate, indeed are de­
fined by, a capacity for idiosyncratic uniqueness in phonic behavior, which

itself is the result of accumulated forks in the road that develop historically
between visual and auditory media. But this phonic chasm between possible
and actual words just highlights how misleading it is to study the phonologi­
cal processing of possible words as a means of understanding the phonolog­
ical processing of actual words. In the same way that there is a qualitative
difference between reading for sound and reading for meaning, so that the


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study of the former does not carry over to the study of the latter, so too does
the qualitative difference between the phonic behavior of possible words
and that of actual words render the study of the former nontransferable to
the latter.
It should be abundantly clear, as already pointed out, that individual
phonics rules do not necessarily convert letters to sounds. Rather, it is the
system as a whole that does this. The complex system of phonics—a system
that relates a set of alphabetic letters to a larger set of phonemes, that inter­
acts with a set of spelling rules, that turns strings of letters into exceptions to
rules, that converts some derived sounds into others, that obeys principles
that evaluate whether one string is contained within another—was not
molded by history to be classroom friendly, or to be a lesson-plan entry for a
reading curriculum. History could not care less about such matters.
Contrary to Foorman and colleagues (Foorman et al., 1997), even if some
aspects of the system were "intentionally" and "conventionally" constructed,
once in the system they evolve and take on a life of their own, moving way be­
yond any alleged initial intention or convention. The model of phonics expli­
cated earlier was developed simply to explain the empirical facts of this

evolved letter-sound system, and its logical organization. It is only by studying
the system of interest that we can assess whether, and to what extent, it needs
to be known in order for someone to be a competent reader.
The psychology and pedagogy of phonics are separate, though related
matters. They deal with whether and how letter-sound relationships are
learned, and whether and how letter-sound relationships are to be taught
in order for them to be learned. But even if we agree that the system must
be known, and must be learned in order to be known, and must be taught
in order to be learned, no classroom teacher would believe that directly
teaching the full complex formal system is the way to accomplish this.
Clearly, the millions of proficient readers who have never been taught
phonics as such constitute crucial evidence in favor of the view that the full
system is not "nonnegotiable."
Still, one could argue that, as with virtually every other classroom subject,
the material must be simplified in order to make it teachable and learnable,
not to mention fun, attention grabbing, and meaningful, a "valuable gift"
rather than "hard work" for the students. The various commercial phonics
programs, which of course bear little resemblance to phonics as an abstract
system and which are more accurately called pseudophonics, may be thought
of as pedagogical material that allows a beginning reader to enter the sys­
tem. It is a key that unlocks the door to further development of the phonics
knowledge base needed to become a proficient reader.
This is the most generous interpretation one can make of commercial
phonics programs, given that the actual system of phonics is profoundly
more complex than what these programs express in their materials. But we


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must then ask: What will the developing reader have gained by entering this
system?
One empirically supportable answer to this question has already been
provided by Richard Venezky (1999), who stated the following:
Phonics is a means to an end, not an end itself. Its functions are somewhat
speculative, but most scholars agree that at least three are crucial to the acqui­
sition of competent reading habits. One is to provide a process for approxi­
mating the sound of a word known from listening but not recognized quickly
by sight. For this to work, decoding patterns need not generate perfect repre­
sentations of speech. Instead they need to get the reader close enough that,
with context, the correct identification can be made. (p. 231)
Venezky's important point is based, in part, on the observation that phonics
rules converting letters into sounds cannot by themselves guarantee a sin­
gle pronunciation for any given word spelling. Sometimes more than one
pronunciation is available for a single spelling. Sometimes information
other than letter-sound correspondences is needed in order to identify a
written word's pronunciation. Thus, in more than one way, even if the al­
phabetic principle were a necessary condition for pronunication of a writ­
ten word, it is far from a sufficient condition.
There are numerous examples that demonstrate this, some of which
have already been discussed. A stem vowel immediately followed by a conso­
nant letter v and final, silent e can be pronounced either short or long, as in
give and hive. The short-vowel forms are whole-word exceptions to the rule
that assigns a long vowel in the setting of silent e.
Words with an interdental fricative [ ], such as gather, rather, tether, and
slither, have a short stem-vowel pronunciation, on the basis of the word be­
ing monomorphemic. An exceptional short-vowel pattern appears in single
morpheme forms with vowel letter o, such as brother, mother, other, and
smother, thus requiring that bother be singled out as a whole-word exception,

which thereby allows it to undergo the usual short-vowel rule.
When the final er is a suffix, the stem vowel can be long, provided it is
long in the unsuffixed form. This can be seen in pairs such as bathe-bather
and teethe-teether. The possibility therefore exists for dual pronunciations, as
in lather (soap) and lather (lathe operator), corresponding to the morpho­
logical status of these words as either monomorphemic or bimorphemic.
Simple words ending in ow can also have more than one pronunciation,
but in this case there is no internal morphological information that can
supplement the phonics rules to make the correct identification. Alongside
how, now, and cow, as well as know, low, and mow, all of which have a single
pronunciation, we also have the dually pronounced bow and sow.


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Monomorphemic words like water and river contrast with fiber and Rover.
A stem-vowel pronunciation is retained in the affixed form: grow-grower and
slow-slower. These complexities again create the possibility of dual pronunci­
ations, as in shower (take a shower) and shower (shower of dogs), or tower
(tower of Babel) and tower (tower of cars).
Words with the vowel digraph ea can be pronounced either as short [E]
(bread, sweat) or long (bead, seat). Dual forms exist, as in read (past and pres­
ent tense) and lead (a lead pipe, lead a band). The stem vowel is retained in
suffixed forms, as in breaded, sweating, beaded, and seated.
The only written word types whose pronunciations are both unambigu­
ous and completely determined by the letters in the word's spelling are
those that undergo rules that essentially have no exceptions. This can be
seen in examples like pin, pit, tip, and tin, each of which has only one pro­

nunciation, completely unconnected to the word's morphological or syn­
tactic status. It is no wonder that Bloomfield (1942/1961) chose such words
to elucidate his conception of an ideal phonics system. And it is no wonder
that fundamentalist phonics primers grind out unnatural language about
fat cats and mats. Yet even in these cases, pronunciation alone will not suf­
fice to narrow down a word's identification, given the abundance of hom­
onyms and productive metaphorical extensions in the language. To iden­
tify bat (rodent) versus bat (baseball tool) versus bat (to hit a ball) versus bat
(flicker an eyelash), or pit (fruit component) versus pit (mining site) versus
pit (confront), and so on and so on, a reader who only used letter-sound
conversions would be entirely unsuccessful.
Therefore, it is perfectly clear that the pronunciation of written words
depends on more than just alphabetic information, and that the alphabetic
principle is insufficient to explain letter-sound conversions. Perhaps most
damaging to phonics fanatics is that pronunciation, no matter how it is derived,
still does not guarantee word identification. Thus, the raison d'etre of pedagogi­
cal phonics, that it is needed so that a reader can identify a word, is under­
mined by an empirical elucidation of the phonics system.
Strangely, Lyon (cited in Clowes, 1999, par. 7) insisted that context does
not aid in identifying a word:
Surprisingly, and in contrast to what conventional wisdom has suggested in
the past, expert readers do not use the surrounding context to figure out a
word they've never seen before. The strategy of choice for expert readers is to
actually fixate on that word and decode it to sound using phonics, (par. 10,
emphasis original)
But it is absolutely necessary for him to hold this completely untenable posi­
tion in order to be a consistent advocate of intensive phonics instruction,


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because if one acknowledged that context could in fact aid in identifying a
word, then one should also advocate research to see whether context is ac­
tually indispensable in identifying a word. If it is, then a pedagogy of isolated,
intensive phonics would be irretrievably undermined.
Even Venezky's (1999) study, probably the most rigorous work on the
rules of letter-sound relationships, concluded that context is an indispensa­
ble element in a reading instruction program that uses phonics. Indeed,
there is so much empirical evidence that supports the role of nonphonics
contextual information in reading (Goodman, 1965, 1973, 1976, 1994;
Smith, 1994), even in mere word identification, that the only way to make
sense of Lyon's assertion (Clowes, 1999) is to acknowledge that he is at least
being consistent in advocating a view that is forced on him solely by the
logic of his paradigm.
The empirical evidence against Lyon's view (Clowes, 1999) is so potent
that it cuts in two ways: context aids in word identification, and reliance
only on phonics cannot lead to word-identification. At best, therefore, even
if we agree that the goal of instruction should be to teach children word
identification strategies, phonics can only take the learner so far. Pounding
phonics into the minds of little children will not magically narrow things
down any more, even if we believe in magical thinking.


Chapter

13

Applications of Scientific Phonics

A scientific theory demonstrates its explanatory power when it sheds light
on phenomena not originally considered in the development of the theory
itself. In this chapter, I discuss some simple examples that suggest the po­
tential power of a scientific theory of phonics. Hopefully, they will prompt
further investigations. But before proceeding to these examples, and in or­
der to clarify certain concepts, I first restate some of the important prob­
lems that distinguish scientific phonics from pseudophonics.
A scientific study of phonics is rooted in two important notions. First, it is
based on an empirical investigation of the patterns of letter-sound connec­
tion as they actually exist in the language, not as they exist in unscientific, prag­
matically inspired commercial primers. Second, it recognizes the relevance
to the study of letter-sound relationships of the logically distinct, yet empiri­
cally interrelated, notions of epistemology, psychology, and pedagogy.
Pseudoscientific phonics, on the other hand, prides itself on experimen­
tal studies that use traditional patterns, themselves the stock of phonics
primers, as if there were some scientific basis for their existence. In fact,
they merely represent simplistic formulations of letter-sound relationships
that, at best, only approximate the empirical truth. Pseudoscientific phon­
ics inappropriately conflates the categories of epistemology, psychology,
and pedagogy, leading to the baseless conclusion that a teachable and classroom-friendly, yet nonscientific, letter-sound pattern is one that a develop­
ing reader needs to learn in order to become a reader, and needs to know
in order to be a reader.
Thus, although the neophonics community blows its horns for "research-based" instructional practices in reading, and for science that is

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"trustworthy" because it is "valid" and "reliable," it has not even undertaken
to demonstrate the validity of its own notion of phonics, a notion that un­
derlies the instructional practices and assessment materials it uses in its ex­
periments. Calling a letter-sound connection "phonics" does not make it so,
just as teaching children to recognize a common noun if it refers to a per­
son, place, or thing is only a pretense of scientific syntax.
With this understanding, consider how an advocate of neophonics might
respond to the following hypothetical study. A group of children under­
goes intensive training on certain phonics patterns, over a reasonably long
period of time. However, pre- and posttraining assessments reveal no im­
provement in their decoding skills. Upon careful scrutiny of the study, ev­
eryone agrees that the experimental design was pristine, the sample size
more than adequate, and the statistical analysis flawless. So, why didn't the
children benefit from the instruction?
Suppose we are able to rule out any question about possible learning dis­
abilities on the part of the children, and teaching disabilities on the part of
the teachers. What remains at this point as the most likely culprit is the ac­
tual instructional material itself.
Perusing these materials, we discover something curious. It seems that
the researchers employed an instructional phonics pattern for vowel di­
graphs, in which the children were taught to pronounce the digraph by
sounding out only the first letter of the pair, and ignoring the second. To
demonstrate the pattern, the children were given lessons on the spellings
and pronunciations of words like Mae, maid, gauge, team, teen, tie, goat, hoe,
true, and juice. The pattern was readily committed to memory, as it was con­
tained in the catchy jingle: "When two vowels go walking, the first one does
the talking." In fact, the children could repeat this jingle so quickly and ac­
curately, it was obvious that it had become automatic.

Of course, the clever children noticed that the fabled Aesop, author of
the tales that their teacher had been reading to them during recess, had a
name that disobeyed the jingle. Prompted by this delightful finding, the
children quickly found other exceptions: plaid, said, gauze, bread, head, lead,
been, heir, tier, trio, broad, blood, food, good, should, and duo. The teacher could
not keep their hands down. Indeed, they found more words that were
jinglephobic than jinglephilic. Fortunately, having learned from past expe­
rience, they set aside ample space on the blackboard for such recalcitrants.
But now we have found a hypothesis that may explain why the children's
decoding skills did not improve: They were taught an incorrect phonics pat­
tern. They should have been taught that the jingle probably holds for most
words in ai, ee, and oa, but after that, it's up for grabs, with words in au, ei,
and oo virtually never following the pattern.
But is this a plausible hypothesis for a neophonics researcher? The an­
swer is a decisive "no." Indeed, on what grounds could a neophonics re­


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147

searcher claim that any pattern is correct or incorrect? The neophonics re­
searcher has no independent theory of letter-sound connections on which
to base such a claim. The only claim that can be made is that some phonics
lessons impart good decoding skills when taught, whereas others do not.
This may be trustworthy pragmatics, but it is hardly trustworthy science.
Thus, in principle, an advocate of intensive phonics instruction who
pushes "research-based" instructional practices undermines the very claim
to scientific trustworthiness when there is no independent theory of lettersound relationships. Without such a theory, we simply do not know if what
is being taught is a real phonics pattern, only an approximation of a phon­

ics pattern, or no phonics pattern at all, that is, a bogus pattern. This is not
to argue that only scientific phonics should be taught in the classroom, and
that there is no place for simplified approximations. That is another matter
altogether. Rather, the issue is that neophonics, in the end, is grounded in
pragmatism and not, as it claims, in valid and reliable science.
Even less satisfying for those eager to develop a scientific understanding
of the forms and functions of written language is that neophonics, in lack­
ing an empirically based theory of letter-sound relationships that is inde­
pendent of the teaching and learning of decoding, has nothing to say about
various other written-language phenomena that also exhibit letter-sound
connections. These include children's invented spellings, dialect or non­
standard spellings, and spellings from historically earlier forms of the lan­
guage. But because scientific phonics sets the abstract system of lettersound relationships apart from how it is learned or taught, it can easily ask
whether the laws of the system that are derived from conventional contem­
porary written English are applicable elsewhere.
Children's invented spellings constitute one class of written words that
may be profitably evaluated against the backdrop of general laws of lettersound connection. The letters used in these spellings are not motivated by a
desire to be classroom friendly, or to conform to traditional patterns, at
least at the earliest stages. Rather, the sizable and interesting literature on
invented spellings has shown that the unconventional spellings used by
young, developing writers are based on their tacit knowledge of phonetic
categories, and on strategies that manipulate letter names (Read, 1975).
Typically, for example, a child at a very early stage of writing develop­
ment will represent long vowel sounds with letters whose names are pro­
nounced with those sounds. The letter a, for example, spells the sound
[ey], and letter e spells the sound [iy]. The same letters are used to repre­
sent the phonetically lax, short counterparts of these long and tense
sounds, such as letter a spelling the sound [e], and letter e spelling the
sound [I].
Can scientific phonics, with its notion of an abstract letter-sound system

that contains rules of a certain form, add to our understanding of invented


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spellings? Consider one first grader's writing samples with "translation" by
Temple et al. (1982, p. 60). This child wrote I GOT BET BAY MSKEDAS AN
ET HRT, translated as / got bit by mosquitos and it hurt, and 7 EM GONE TO
FRJEYE AN I HAV A HEDAC, translated as I am going to Virginia and I have a
headache.
Notice, first of all, that this writer's invented spellings exhibit welldocumented characteristics. The letter/is used to spell the sound that be­
gins its name, that is, [j] (FRJEYE "Virginia"). A short-vowel sound is spelled
with the vowel letter whose long-vowel pronunciation is the phonetically
tense variant of that short vowel. Thus, the letter E is used to spell the sound
[I] (BET "bit"; ET"it"), the short, phonetically nontense variant of long,
tense [iy].
But Temple et al. (1982) made an additional interesting and important
observation about these invented spellings. They pointed out that "every
letter in the sample stands for a sound, and no letters are supplied unneces­
sarily" (p. 60). That is, there are no silent letters. Thus, in FRJEYE, F stands
for [f ], R stands for [R], J stands for [j], and so on.
Some sounds are not supplied with a letter. There is no letter for the [n]
sound of Virginia. And the [d] of and lacks a letter, though perhaps this is
also missing in the child's ordinary pronunciation of the word.
In this system, therefore, each letter has a corresponding sound, but not
every sound has a corresponding letter. This principle manifests itself in a
number of additional ways. There are no consonant digraphs to be found
in the spellings of HEDAC "headache," and GONE "going." There is no

vowel digraph or silent e in the spelling HEDAC "headache." The syllabic 7?
of HRT "hurt" and FRJEYE "Virginia" is spelled with a single letter R, not
with a vowel-R combination. Silent e is absent in HAV "have."
For this child, an otherwise expected vowel letter is absent not only when
the vowel sound is syllabic R, or the [0] of silent e, or derived from a conven­
tionally written digraph, but in the first syllable of the word MSKEDAS "mos­
quitos" as well. In this word, instead of a vowel letter appearing in the first
syllable, the letter S seems to take on this syllabic function. Indeed, from an
articulatory standpoint, there is an almost immediate transition from [m]
to [s], and the [s] can be elongated in its oral rendering, analogous to any
vowel sound.
Given this observation , all of the invented spellings in this simple corpus
can be seen to obey the principle that, within words, letters representing
consonant and vowel sounds must alternate with one another, as shown in
Fig. 13.1. Notice that, in order to maintain this template, letter Fmust be
regarded as a consonant letter only, not as a vowel letter, so that it not only
spells the sound [y] in FRJEYE, but, in addition, it requires the intrusion of
an otherwise unconventional vowel letter in the spelling BAY "by." The
word for "and" keeps its N, but therefore does not permit its D, because that


149

APPLICATIONS OF SCIENTIFIC PHONICS

V CVC CVC CVC CVCVCVC VC VC CVC

I GOT BET BAY MSKEDAS AN ET HRT.

V VC CVCV CV CVCVCV VC V CVC V CVCVC

I EM GONE TO FRJEYE AN I HAV A HEDAC

FIG. 13.1. Structure of invented spellings.

would create two consonant letters in succession. The word for "going" is
spelled GONE, because the otherwise expected GOEN, in containing two
successive vowels, would violate the template.
Clearly, the template is a feature of the spelling system alone, and not of
the pronunciations of the words, because not all of the spelled words match
the template phonetically, insofar as they do not all have alternating consonant-vowel pronunciations, as in mo[sk] uitos, Virgi[ny]a, and a[nd].
The template immediately expresses the notion that for this child, a
word's spelling only approximates its pronunciation, a finding consistent
with Venezky's (1999, p. 231) notion of the role of letter-sound connections
in word identification. In addition, the requirement that each letter have a
corresponding sound, in conjunction with the general absence of conso­
nantal digraphs, vocalic digraphs, double letters to represent syllabic R, and
so on, strongly suggests that the individual letter-sound correspondences
that describe the corpus are all of the simplest form: A phoneme is repre­
sented by a single letter, without reference to any other letter in the word's
spelling. The phonics rules for the first sentence of this corpus can be ex­
pressed as in Table 13.1.
TABLE 13.1
Phonics Rules for Invented Spellings
/ GOT BET BAY MSKEDAS AN ET HRT.
I is pronounced [ay].
G is pronounced [g].
O is pronounced [a].
T is pronounced [t].

B is pronounced [b].
£ is pronounced [I].
T is pronounced [t].

A is pronounced [a].
Y is pronounced [y].
M is pronounced [m].
S is pronounced [s].
K is pronounced [k].
E is pronounced [iy].
D is pronounced [d].

A is pronounced [ae].
S is pronounced [z].
A is pronounced [ ].
.N is pronounced [n].
H is pronounced [h].
R is pronounced [R].


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Clearly, all of the rules in Table 13.1 have a default form, where a single
letter becomes a sound without influence from any neighboring letters. But
on closer inspection, we see that certain letters can represent more than
one sound. Thus, letter A can spell the sounds [a], [9], and [ae]. Letter E
can spell the sounds [I] and [iy]. Thus, whereas the individual rules exhibit
a default form, the system as a whole does not exhibit a strict default func­

tion, in which each letter has one, and only one, default phoneme.
Of course, the previous examples can be described by nondefault rules
that turn letters into sounds in virtue of their appearing in a specified al­
phabetic context. Thus, the letter E is pronounced [I] when followed by a
word-final consonant letter, as in BET.
However, there is little independent evidence for the use of nondefault
spellings by this young writer. For example, even though the word / is
spelled with the letter I, which appears to be a conventional spelling, this
could just as easily follow from the letter being used in a default fashion.
The spelling HEDAC, however, uses £ in a conventional way, to spell short
[e], whereas the typical invented patterns use E for the sounds [iy] and [I].
This conventional short-vowel usage does suggest a nondefault correspon­
dence.
The strategy of using a simple alternating consonant-vowel template in
conjunction with rules that, for the most part, hold to a simple, default
form, is a hypothesis about this stage of this particular child's writing devel­
opment. It is obviously preliminary. The analysis is motivated solely by the
desire to demonstrate the possibility of using constructs from a scientific
theory of phonics to understand certain aspects of literacy.
It should be acknowledged that an abstract model of letter-sound rela­
tionships is also missing from meaning-centered approaches to reading.
But then, its adherents have not claimed that the alphabetic principle is the
"nonnegotiable" element of reading. What it has claimed, that attention to
meaning is central and paramount, it has also studied, so that we now have
a much better understanding of the cognitive resources that thinking be­
ings use in this task.
A scientific understanding of phonics distinguishes the abstract lettersound system from how it is learned, and whether it needs to be taught.
Meaning-centered advocates have addressed this issue as well. There is
abundant evidence that a child who appears weak with a certain lettersound pattern in some situations may nevertheless exhibit little difficulty in
other situations. This immediately poses the question of whether the pat­

tern needs to be explicitly taught, or if we just need to alter the reading situ­
ation so as to better elicit what the reader already knows.
For example, Goodman and Marek (1996) described a young reader
named Amy, whose teacher wanted to know if she was correctly learning the
ea digraph. The teacher prepared a word list containing ea words, with in­


APPLICATIONS OF SCIENTIFIC PHONICS

151

structions for Amy to identify whether the word was pronounced with the
vowel sound of each, head, or great. (A fourth sound for ea occurs in the pro­
nunciation of the word bear, which is distinct from the vowel sound of dear,
fear, and so on.) The teacher also composed a short story filled with ea
words, and had Amy read the story aloud. On the word-list assignment, Amy
missed 15 of the first 31 words (she did not complete the task), identifying
sweat and pheasant, for example, as pronounced with the vowel sound of the
word each. She missed 1 word out of 19 in the short passage, and had no dif­
ficulty with the words sweat and pheasant.
Amy was thus quite erratic in decoding ea on her worksheet, but she pro­
nounced nearly every ea word in her text reading exactly as expected. Thus,
for Amy, there was slightly better-than-chance performance on word identifi­
cation in isolation, in which the demand is greater on using letter-sound
knowledge, and near-perfect performance on words in the context of a story,
where grammatical and extragrammatical cuing sources are available.
Does Amy need extra instruction in decoding ea? Anyone who believes
that her accurate rendition of the text words is due to successful decoding
must acknowledge that she already knows the pattern. This is especially
true if context is not utilized, as Lyon (Clowes, 1999) has claimed. There­

fore, giving her lessons on decoding ea will not teach her anything she does
not already know.
But if context is not utilized, including syntactic and textual features,
how else can the discrepancy in Amy's oral readings be explained? Clearly,
neophonics offers no solution to this problem. The ea pattern is no differ­
ent for a word in isolation versus the same word in a text. But if a neo­
phonics advocate acquiesces to the utility of contextual information, as this
case strongly argues for, then the alphabetic principle suddenly becomes
very negotiable.
How might an advocate of meaning-centered reading explain Amy's per­
formance? Of course, it is perfectly clear that utilizing syntactic and textual
cues must be playing a role, because these are what distinguish the textreading setting from the individual-word-reading setting. These cuing sys­
tems enhance Amy's oral reading performance.
Conversely, depriving Amy of opportunities to use these cuing systems
impairs her oral reading performance, and can also lead to the erroneous
conclusion that her problem lies in decoding. Removing ordinary cuing sys­
tems imposes a performance obstacle on Amy, such that we may underesti­
mate her actual reading proficiency.
In this example, evidence from text reading indicates that Amy does
know the ea patterns. However, when assessments deprive readers of ordi­
nary linguistic cuing mechanisms, what they know may not be appreciated.
Then, if teaching is thought of as something needed to fill in knowledge
gaps, it may be deemed necessary in such mistakenly diagnosed readers.


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But scientific phonics, unlike pseudophonics, understands that spellings

can, at best, only approximate a word's pronunciation, and that pronuncia­
tion is, in any case, an insufficient means to word identification. To the ex­
tent that word identification plays a role in reading, and this may not be all
that great, contextual information must be utilized.
But we have seen that contextually rich assessment materials, which en­
courage a reader to recruit a broad range of cuing systems, can also reveal
the reader's proficiency with the more narrow cuing systems, such as lettersound relationships, a proficiency that may be missed if assessment materi­
als are overly narrow. Now, mistakes can be avoided regarding which as­
pects of reading need to be taught, or focused on, in reading classrooms.
The use of assessments in deciding aspects of a reader's proficiency, and
in formulating an appropriate teaching plan, also finds its niche in certain
special populations, such as stroke patients with language impairments. In
these neurological settings, assessments are also called diagnostic tests, and
teaching and learning for the purpose of recovering lost language function
is called rehabilitation. Despite the medical terminology, the concepts in­
volved are virtually identical to those in a more traditional educational set­
tingConsider the case of a 58-year-old man whom I will call "Phil" (discussed
in Strauss, 1999). Phil suffered a stroke in the posterior region of the left
hemisphere. As a result of this stroke, he developed severe difficulty under­
standing language, a condition known as receptive aphasia. His speech was
fluent, exhibiting normal intonation and phoneme articulation, but was
characterized by numerous nonsense words, or jargon, and was mostly in­
comprehensible. Presumably, this feature followed from the problem with
self-monitoring that accompanies difficulty with comprehending.
In one task, I gave Phil various written materials to read aloud, which he
did following some practice sessions. These materials included passages
from stories, magazine advertisements, and other "authentic" texts. In a
separate session, Phil read aloud individual words, selected as every 10th
word from the text passages, but now appearing in isolated fashion on in­
dex cards. Text readings and individual-word readings alternated.

In reading an isolated word on an index card, Phil would typically point
sequentially from left to right to the individual letters of the word and pro­
duce an oral expression, sometimes a full syllable in length, corresponding
to each letter. Table 13.2 shows some examples of this fingerpointing read­
ing. Virtually every word that Phil read from an index card was read in this
fingerpointing fashion. However, in striking contrast to these oral rendi­
tions, Phil's production of fingerpointing reading was practically nonexis­
tent when reading connected, authentic text. In texts consisting of 171,
114, 82, and 61 words, he read with fingerpointing on 3, 1, 0, and 4 words,
respectively. Generally, Phil read these texts with normal prosody and seg­


APPLICATIONS OF SCIENTIFIC PHONICS

153

TABLE 13.2
Phil's Fingerpoint Reading (Strauss, 1999)
Printed Word
other
and
were
entangling

Phil's Fingerpointing Oral Reading
5—h—a—2—3
prach-a-a
space-h-a—3
p—h—o—o—o—o—o—l—l—l

mental articulation, though, as with his spontaneous speech, it was mostly
incomprehensible.
How do we account for this remarkable disparity? Consider that, in read­
ing the individual words, Phil breaks them down into their component let­
ters, a mental phenomenon that is overtly reflected in his fingerpointing
behavior. Indeed, each fingerpointing vocalization corresponds to a single
letter in the word, and each letter is rendered with fingerpointing. Phil, al­
most literally, wears his mental behavior on the end of his sleeve.
Now, this complex psychomotor behavior is strikingly parallel to that of a
reader who breaks down individual written words into their component let­
ters and attempts to sound each of them out. We can say that Phil exhibits
an aphasic variant of phonics.
But why is this a substantially unpreferred reading behavior when the
written material consists of whole, connected text? A plausible hypothesis is
that connected text provides Phil, as it does any reader, far more linguistic
resources than individual words in isolation, and that the oral readings re­
flect these differences. Connected, written text achieves its visual appear­
ance not simply on the basis of containing lots of individual words, but,
quite obviously, also on the basis of these words having a syntactic and tex­
tual organization. None of this is available to individual words on a flash
card. Reading connected text with normal prosody shows that Phil is sensi­
tive to the syntactic and textual features of the written material. With these
cuing systems unavailable for isolated words, Phil is left only with a string of
letters to mentally process. Unless he readily recognizes the printed word as
a whole, which is already problematic because of his aphasia, he will recruit
the only available cuing systems and use them accordingly. Phil's reading
behavior shows that phonics, or a quasiphonics componential recognition
strategy, is utilized when it is virtually the only cuing system available. But,
when other cuing systems are available, it is relegated to a marginal and
subordinate role.

Phil's oral reading behavior is not an isolated case. First of all, a "letter­
naming" strategy among aphasic readers for words read in isolation has been
discussed in the aphasia literature, and is the subject of a lively debate among
researchers interested in single-word processing (cf., e.g., Bub et al., 1980;


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Warrington & Langdon, 1990; Warrington & Shallice, 1980). I documented
other individuals with receptive aphasia besides Phil in whom there is a near
disappearance of this behavior when the reading material is authentic, con­
nected text (Strauss, 1999). Consider the oral readings of "Betty," a 61-yearold woman who had a stroke in the left frontoparietal lobe of the brain. Stan­
dardized testing using the Western Aphasia Battery (WAB, Kertesz, 1982)
showed some halting, expressive difficulties, in addition to her difficulties
with understanding speech. When asked to read individual words from the
WAB, she exhibited the same fingerpointing behavior seen with Phil. She
pointed sequentially from left to right to each individual letter and read
aloud a syllable of varying complexity for each of the letters. Table 13.3 shows
some of these oral readings. But on connected-text reading, she exhibited
the fingerpointing behavior on only 4 of 428 words.
Like Phil, Betty exhibited the same pattern of fingerpointing oral read­
ing, in which a componential, quasiphonics behavior is exhibited promi­
nently for words in isolation, but far less prominently for words in context.
Phonics is a strategy of last resort. It is used when other cuing systems are in­
adequate by themselves, or simply unavailable.
An interesting type of oral reading miscue, often seen in poor readers,
shines a light on what happens when a reader not only shuns text-based
cuing systems, but is also not saved by relying primarily on the letter-sound

system. Abundant evidence exists that poor readers often overuse grapho­
phonic information at the expense of other cuing systems, such as mor­
phology, syntax, and semantics. Weaver (2002) provided numerous exam­
ples of this, such as one young reader who produced "The girls of the
vengil" where the text showed "The girls of the village," and another who
produced "School was not as imprentice" where the text showed "School
was not as important" (p. 66). Another poor reader rendered "Well, we
heard the farmer's wife screaming" as "Well, we heard the fam wif scring"
(p. 135) and still another rendered "was in real trouble" as "was in ruh
duhroo" (p. 138).
A curious occurrence in the oral readings of some readers is a tendency
to either repeat or abandon an otherwise correct response. Weaver (2002,
TABLE 13.3
Betty's Fingerpoint Reading From the
Western Aphasia Battery Test (Strauss, 1999)
Betty's Fingerpointing Oral Reading
comb
pencil
matches
screwdriver

eet-oh-eet-oh
o-e-e-o-e-o
eet-r-e-e-e-r-e
eet-r-e-e-e-e-r-e-e-r-e


APPLICATIONS OF SCIENTIFIC PHONICS

155

p. 218) reported a poor reader who read "my head bowed" as "my head bl-,
bow, bow," at which point the teacher interrupted to tell the child that the
reading was correct.
But why should such a phenomenon occur? Why would a reader repeat a
word that is already correctly sounded out? Most certainly, there are numer­
ous factors, but one may be this: A developing reader who is taught that
print needs to be sounded out, in order for words on the page to be identi­
fied, does not necessarily read with the belief that words can be recognized
using other cuing systems. Because the epiphany of word recognition is ex­
pected to follow automatically once the correct pronunciation is produced,
the reader's sole obligation is to produce the correct sounds.
A reader who repeats an acceptably produced word may therefore not
have experienced that purported automatic next step. Though the reader
has turned the print into sound, sound, by itself, has not yet been turned
into word recognition. But what more can the reader do? All the letters
have been decoded, accurately in fact, and context is not regarded as an
available resource. So the only option is to say the word again, and again
and again if necessary, to see if that will spark recognition.
In terms of teaching, and if context is verboten, what more can an advo­
cate of intensive phonics offer at this point, except more phonics? And if
that still fails . . . ?